Persuasion at the Salisbury Playhouse

Of Jane Austen’s novels, Persuasion is among the least popular for bonnet-drama adaptations. It is less satirical than most, less concerned with youthful naivety. Anne Elliot is a thoughtful, faded heroine: her “bloom”, we are brutally informed, lost since a mentor persuaded her to renounce her seafaring lover. A suffering stillness and hidden inner life work splendidly in novels, for some of us even better than the bouncing misprisions of Emma or the sharp wit of Lizzie Bennet.

In this new adaptation, Tim Luscombe also had to work with a story most unnatural to the stage, moving between four houses and three neighbourhoods, and weaving in more strands than is comfortable in a two-hour play. Apart from the central love story we have the intrigues…